A model of job satisfaction for collaborative development processes

Abstract

Modern software development relies on collaborative work as a means for sharing knowledge, distributing tasks and responsibilities, reducing risk of failures, and increasing the overall quality of the software product. Such objectives are achieved with a continuous share of the programmers' daily working life that inevitably influences the programmers' job satisfaction. One of the major challenges in process management is to determine the causes of this satisfaction. Traditional research models job satisfaction with social aspects of collaborative work like communication, work sustainability, and work environment. This study reflects on existing models of job satisfaction in collaborative environments, creates one for modern software development processes, and validates it with a retrospective comparative survey run on a sample of 108 respondents. In addition, the work investigates the impact on job satisfaction and its model of the agile practice of Pair Programming that pushes job sharing to the extreme. With this intent, the questionnaire also collected feedback from pair programmers whose responses were used for a comparative analysis. The results demonstrate that Pair Programming has actually a strong positive effect on satisfaction, work sustainability, and communication. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.